Human conflict is the force that moves drama. Drama in motion picture film, television and stage is based on conflicts between the characters and the problems they encounter. The dialog that emerges from these conflicts is what makes the drama captivating and entertaining. The kinds of dialog that expose or resolve human conflicts can be used in talking video games.
Human players have long been able to control what characters do and what actions they perform in prior-art video games. But adding voice sounds and talking animated picture sequences to prior-art video games is not enough to simulate a face to face voice conversation. Talking video games such as Wanderers From Ys have animated cartoon sequences that alternate with side-scrolling skill-and-action sequences in which some of the characters talk. Although the actions of some of the characters can be controlled by a human player, characters do not yet talk to each other using words selected by a human player to verbalize the conflicts between the characters.
Prior-art talking video games are disclosed in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,305,131; 4,333,152; 4,445,187 and 4,569,026.
It is well known for human players to input choices using any of a variety of input devices such as push buttons, rotatable knobs, pressure sensitive membranes, proximity sensitive pads, screen overlays, light pens, light sensitive guns, joy sticks, keyboards, mouse, track balls, moving cursors or crosshairs, or scrolling through highlighted options, speech recognition, etc.
The characters in video games and computer games, especially role-playing games, are of two types: player-controlled characters (or player characters) and non-player characters. A player-controlled character is a human player's animated surrogate or proxy and does or says what the human player chooses to have him do or say. Non-player characters are not directly controlled by a human player, but can be indirectly influenced, either by responding to input from a human player or by responding to what a player-controlled character does or says.
In the prior art, each choice by the human can be immediately followed by a synthesized voice or digitized voice recording that speaks the words selected by the human player, so the human will quickly adjust to the fact that the spoken words he hears for his side of the dialog are initiated by his fingers rather than his vocal cords.